Gandhi

If one political figure influenced the early anti-war protests, it was Gandhi. After a world war and Hiroshima non-violence became part of the imagined path to change with new force.
Gandhi imagined it and practiced it long before and Martin Luther King did. The protestors renewed an old belief. The protests against the racially selected Springboks football team's visit to Brisbane
led to more Indigenous action, more protests, a University strike and a vicious night assault on protesters outside the footballers' hotel. A government State of Emergency, usually reserved for war
and industrial control of large strikes, allowed police to amass and act with even less restraint than usual, and perhaps even contrary to their 'superiors' intentions.